Word Cloud Party

An interactive word-cloud of topics, displaying engagement volume and sentiment. A demo is available here.

Design decisions

Server

• Server app is responsible for serving both the client assets and REST API
• Integration tests

Client

• React app handles client-side rendering with a clean component heirarchy
• Flux architecture takes care of application actions and object stores using Alt
• HTML uses BEM for sane namespacing
• Sass split into BEM components
• Components components components
• Unit tests for controller-views, flux and networking

Installation

npm install

Environment variables

A .env file in the root provides some development defaults, but should not be used in production.

Key	Description
NODE_ENV	Environment e.g. production, development
PROTOCOL	http, https
PORT	Port for incoming HTTP requests (PaaS should set this automatically)
HOST	Used to construct the base URL
LOG_LEVEL	debug for development, info for production

Running

To run the build and server:

npm start

Should you need to watch the Sass & client-side JS during development:

npm run dev

To do ⏱

• Animation when state changes
• Show detail in flyout menu for small-screen displays
• Isomorphic rendering on the server